Canton: The Misplaced County Seat
Canton, Van Zandt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Texas Legislature created Van Zandt County in 1848. It originally included nearly 2,000 square miles of territory. Jordan's Saline, now Grand Saline, was near the county's geographic location and became the first seat of government. Two years later, with the creation of Wood County from part of Van Zandt, officials had to select a new county seat based on the changed boundaries. In December 1850, the Commissioners Court purchased 320 acres of land from Obey W. Owens and sent a surveyor to determine the right site for the new town of Canton. Officials soon built a courthouse, jail and post office in the new town, but in less than three years the county discovered an error in the survey. The new county seat was actually two-and-a-half miles from the county's land. Canton, it turned out, was on property owned by John George Woldert. He donated 160 acres of land to the county in January 1853, however, to avert the legal crisis. Despite Woldert's generosity, which meant county officials did not have to move the county seat or pay him for the mistake, many Van Zandt County residents were unhappy with the situation and wanted Canton relocated to the site as originally planned. So great was the resentment that following construction of a brick courthouse in 1857, county voters elected officials who refused to pay for the building for many years. The debt was finally resolved in 1880. Today, Van Zandt's county seat remains on the wrong site. Since the surveying mistake more than 150 years ago, though, the city of Canton has grown into a regional commercial center, known most notably for its First Monday Trade Days. (2005)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When the Texas Legislature carved Van Zandt County out of the frontier in 1848, its seat of government wandered with its shifting boundaries — first at Jordan's Saline, then to the newly platted town of Canton in 1850. A surveying blunder soon revealed that Canton sat two and a half miles off the county's own land, and only a landowner's donation in 1853 spared officials the cost and chaos of moving the seat. Resentment ran so deep that voters refused to pay for the 1857 brick courthouse until 1880.
Why it matters
The story captures the improvised, error-prone business of organizing local government on the antebellum Texas frontier, where a surveyor's mistake could shape a town's location for generations.
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Related people
- · Obey W. Owens
- · John George Woldert
Related events
- · Creation of Van Zandt County (1848)
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Highland Cemetery
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Highland Cemetery, established by 1894, served a Van Zandt County farming community that took shape once a new road opened easier access to markets. Settlers built a school in 1889 that doubled as a meeting house for Methodist and Church of Christ worshippers, and the surrounding families raised cotton, then tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and eventually cattle. Its obelisks, Woodmen of the World marker, and graves of Civil War veterans make it one of the last vestiges of the vanished Highland settlement.
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Cool Springs was named for the dozen springs and seeps around a spot that also divides the Trinity, Sabine, and Neches watersheds. After 1850 it became a favored resting place on the road from Canton to Athens, drawing settlers to a nearby gin, and by the late 1800s it supported churches, a school, stores, and a post office under the name Tundra. Shifting agriculture eventually hollowed the community out, and its residents have dwindled to a memory.
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